Iron Skin
Chris's manner grew even more overbearing.
"Send me the mask."
"Pardon?"
"I'll let you live. Take off the mask you're wearing and send it to me at Mick Magic Tower."
The man couldn't bring himself to agree. He hesitated.
"If I take the mask off, my face will be exposed."
"Then take the chance. Drop the mask and step into the light."
"But then... my cover as a spy will be blown."
"Don't stay there. Go back to Hermann Magic Tower, where you originally belonged. Problem solved."
"Number One is dead. I'm a kite with its string cut. If I go back, they'll turn me into raw material."
"I'll shelter you."
"You will...?"
"I told you. I've become the disciple of Ultimate Mage Grain. My standing now is higher than the highest elder of your tower. Protecting one man like you is nothing. I'll put in a word, so leave Tulleno Magic Tower, send me the mask, and sit tight inside Hermann."
"Do you truly mean to protect me?"
"Do you have a choice? Stop talking and do as you're told."
Chris cut the connection and smoothed the slight change that had come over his face. He loafed for a while, and when he went back he found Grain tossing foul-smelling herbs into a pit the man had dug himself. Black water had pooled in a hole twice the size of a bathtub.
Grain shot him a sidelong glance.
"The head?"
"What head?"
"Stan's head."
"Oh, that. I thought about having it stuffed, but it was too crushed to be worth looking at. I burned it."
"Did you?"
Grain let it pass.
"Sit over there."
The ground rose and shaped itself into a chair. Chris sat in the seat Grain had made on the spot.
"What body art did you learn?"
"Iron Body."
The hand that had been tossing herbs stopped dead.
"You lunatic!"
He looked utterly dumbfounded.
"You mastered Iron Body?"
"Yes."
"It's a wonder you didn't die."
"I thought you had learned Iron Body as well, Master."
"Why would you think that?"
"Because you're the Body Mage who represents Mick Magic Tower, and they said you'd climbed all sixty steps."
"I'm not a madman. Why would I learn a training method that insane?"
"So you didn't."
"Absolutely not. Why did you learn Iron Body?"
Chris answered shortly.
"I was tricked."
Grain caught the tangle of feeling packed into that single word and laughed.
"Sounds like a story that's hard to tell."
"Yes."
Then, out of nowhere, he said something that didn't follow at all.
"I really am a wonderful master."
"Why do you think so?"
"I don't pry into your story. Into your past."
"And that makes you wonderful?"
"You're suspicious in every particular."
"Me?"
"Starting with the mask."
"You knew?"
"If you killed the Children of the Mask and took their place, of course you'd be wearing one."
He rubbed his earlobe and went on.
"I've got ears too."
"So you do."
Anyone who matters already knows.
Even so, Chris had no intention of taking the mask off. He didn't want his true face seen.
Wait. Why shouldn't I?
Then he shook his head.
No. Leave it. He had to hide even the trivial things from men like these. Otherwise trouble would follow, and it might be turned into a weakness.
Grain spoke.
"Why the sudden head-shaking?"
"Because you don't seem all that wonderful, Master."
"Wrong. Think about it. I don't interrogate you, suspicious as you are from head to toe. I don't dig up your past. I take you as a disciple and bestow my teaching, and I keep the mages who dislike you from making your life a misery."
"I haven't received any teaching yet."
All Grain had done was drag the unwilling Chris around after him.
"I meant to teach you once the preparations were finished. But it's become a bit of a problem."
A problem. Glad to hear it.
"What's the problem?"
"There's good news and bad news about it. Which do you want first?"
"The bad news."
"You said you mastered Iron Body. It's too different from my own body art, so unfortunately I can no longer pass on my great art to you."
"Ah. What a terrible shame."
It wasn't.
"I really wanted to learn it."
He had no desire to learn any more body arts. What Chris wanted was magic.
Grain brandished a clenched fist.
"But who am I?"
"Who are you?"
"Grain. The peerless mage Mick Magic Tower produced."
That sounds ominous.
"Is that the good news?"
"The good news is that you learned Iron Body."
"You just said it was a shame that I learned Iron Body. How does that bad news turn into good news?"
"You're used to pain, aren't you?"
"More or less."
"Perfect. You might even call it a blessing in disguise. I will now bestow my teaching."
The instant the words left his mouth, the chair beneath Chris lurched upright and flung him toward a pit of black water so foul that the mere sight of it sent revulsion crawling up the spine. He tried to raise a wind and catch himself as he flew, but Grain intervened and bound his body, and he plunged in helplessly.
Splash.
Water surged up and sank again. Chris thrust his face above the surface and screamed.
"Aaaagh!"
The black liquid melted every stitch of clothing he wore, then went on to melt his skin. The pain was past anything words could hold. Even Chris, who had endured the agony of Iron Body, shuddered to his core.
"Shit! How is this good news!"
The curse tore out of him on its own.
"Endure the pain, and you'll have a body even a Master can't cut."
"Aaaagh!"
"Stop screaming and put your head under too."
"No!"
"That skull of yours needs hardening as well. Otherwise it becomes a weak point. Worried the mask will melt? Then I'll take it off for you."
He rose, drifting, and reached out to peel the mask from Chris's face.
"There. In you go, easy as you please."
He pressed Chris's head down with his foot.
"Close your eyes if you don't want to go blind."
Blub, blub, blub.
Chris's head went under the black liquid.
"Whoops. Nearly splashed my shoes."
The moment his shoe threatened to touch the liquid, he snatched his foot back. As soon as the foot lifted, Chris tried to raise his head.
"Put it back."
Grain formed a hand of air and shoved Chris's face down into the liquid. Chris thrashed in agony, swallowed a mouthful, and blacked out.
"Aaaagh!"
Chris bolted upright with a scream. He was naked, and he was outside the pit. He frantically checked his body. His skin had flushed an angry red. Hideous to look at, but the flesh that had melted was regenerated all the same.
"Awake?"
"Yes."
"You must not drink the Iron Skin solution. Your esophagus and stomach melted, and I had a miserable time treating them."
Chris roared.
"Who would drink it because they wanted to! It hurt so much I screamed, and it went down my throat!"
"Is that so? Fortunate, then. I thought you'd drunk it out of a firm resolve to temper your innards as well."
Grain was digging a fresh pit beside the first.
What is he about to do now?
Fear seized Chris all at once.
"That—that—that..."
"This pit is for the recovery solution. Don't worry."
Chris's breathing turned rough.
"Recovery solution? You mean you're going to throw me back into that damned pit?"
"Of course I am. The skin hardens by melting and growing back, over and over."
"Shit!"
"You are the disciple of Great Mage Grain. Coarse language won't do. Maintain your dignity."
Chris pleaded.
"I mastered Iron Body. My skin is already as hard as steel. I don't need that."
"But steel is still cut by a Master's aura. I'm going to give you skin that can withstand aura as well."
The finger Chris pointed at the black liquid trembled.
"Did you go through that yourself?"
"Of course not. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to complete Iron Skin?"
He shuddered as he went on.
"I hate pain. I've hated it since I was little."
Fury tore a shout out of Chris.
"Then why are you doing it to me!"
"Because you mastered Iron Body. Iron Body and Iron Skin. A truly fitting pair. A match made in heaven."
"You were already digging that pit before you knew I'd mastered Iron Body. You'd decided to teach me this whether I'd learned it or not."
"Exactly. That alone is proof that fate chose you."
"Fate?"
"You were fated to master Iron Skin."
"And you, I see, mastered an iron face instead."
"If the chance comes later, go find Iron Head, Iron Heart, Iron Foot, Iron Leg, Iron Shoulder, Iron Arm, Iron Hand—things of that sort—and learn those too."
"Those exist?"
"I've never seen them, or heard of them. But some other world might have them."
He pointed at the ceiling with one finger.
"The Middle Realm, I mean."
"I'm going to lose my mind."
"You mustn't."
Grain formed a hand of air and seized him. Chris threw every spell he had into breaking free, but the air hand didn't budge. An air hand was magic even a mage of Thought Formulation could cast, yet when an Ultimate Mage used it the power was monstrous. Realizing that even a spell classed as low-grade could become devastating in the right hands, Chris was driven down into the Iron Skin solution.
Splash. Blub, blub, blub.
Thirty minutes later, every inch of skin melted away, Chris looked like a cow skinned and hung in a butcher's shop. He was transferred into a tub where milky liquid sloshed, and the pale fluid knit his skin back together. The itch was so fierce he screamed.
"Damn it!"
"Scratch, and we repeat it once for every scratch."
At Grain's warning, Chris forced himself to endure. Bearing the itch was every bit as hard as bearing the pain of melting skin. If the black liquid's agony was a ten, the white liquid's was an eight.
"How many times do I have to do this?"
He spoke through gritted teeth.
"Well, this is my first time too."
"Your first?"
"It takes a great many expensive materials. Gathering them alone took more than a hundred years."
"Then why did you prepare them at all?"
"To raise a disciple."
"And I had the rotten luck to be the one who got caught."
"You were chosen by good fortune."
"If you hadn't found me, who were you planning to take?"
"For a hundred years I agonized between two choices. Catch a clever mage and teach him body arts, or kidnap a knight of Master rank and teach him magic."
He added, smiling brightly.
"Even I didn't know the dilemma would end this well."
He looked at Chris's face and clicked his tongue.
"No hair, no eyebrows. You look ugly. A man really does need a good head of hair."
Chris went in and out of the Iron Skin solution and the recovery solution more than a hundred times. The Iron Skin solution, pitch-black at the start, grew gradually paler, while the recovery solution, white at the start, darkened little by little. Only when the two liquids had drawn nearly to the same color did Chris's suffering end. It took exactly ten days.
"Raise your arm."
Chris did as he was told, and Grain formed a blade of wind and cut at the arm.
Thock.
The arm wasn't cut.
"This should do. Next you'll learn—"
Chris started so hard he nearly went into a fit.
"There's more?"
"The painful part is over, so don't worry."
Chris didn't believe him. He shifted his hips back and watched the man warily.
"Has the boy spent his whole life being tricked?"
Grain tutted, then went on.
"What's under the skin?"
"Blood vessels."
"There are blood vessels, yes, but that isn't how people usually put it. Under the skin there's subcutaneous fat, and muscle. When a Master's aura splits the skin—"
Chris cut him off.
"You said it would block aura."
"That's a manner of speaking. It can't block it completely. A Grandmaster's aura, even less so. So I'll teach you how to harden the fat and the muscle with mana. A mana circulation method passed down to a single successor. It's called Cober Circulation."
Chris had no particular wish to learn it, but under coercion he had no choice. He started out on full guard, yet the method itself proved, unexpectedly, to be excellent. His fat and muscle grew hard, and tough.